This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Google’s actions against “overoptimised” sites have been intensified and it seems that the recent updates are able to detect various links-related overoptimisation violations that can result in short or long-term positional drops, with or without warnings. Even though Google announced the Penguin update on the 24th if April 2012, changes on Google’s link evaluation system have been noticeable several weeks before the public announcement.

It appears that in some cases Google has been overzealous, hitting (temporarily) even websites with rather natural link profiles. In other cases, Google admitted algorithmic classification mistakes, publishing apologetic messages like this one Matt Cutts posted on Google+.

According to Patrick Altoft (branded3) the sites that have received unnatural links notifications fall under five main categories, and they are not just the ones participating in link exchanges or other types of link networks. Rand made a Whiteboard Friday video about 6 changes every SEO should make before the overoptimisation penalty hits. Now that Google has rolled out the Penguin update against "black web spam," making sure that your website's backlink profile does not violate Google's quality guidelines is quite essential, especially if your traffic has gone down.

This is a follow up to the post ‘How to Monitor Your Website For Link Equity Loss’, which can be used to identify backlinks from low quality or penalised/deindexed websites. However, this post intends to cover the following links related overoptimisation cases:

A) Excessive Link Acquisition

B) Site-wide links detection

C) Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

D) Unnatural Spread of Links Authority

A. Excessive Link Acquisition Check

Acquiring a high number of links over a short period of time has never been a good practice and webmasters need to keep an eye on the levels of acquired links, especially these days that negative SEO seems to become more of an issue. Phrases like the following one from Dan Thies, seem to be heard more often lately:

"Both sites have received “unnatural links” messages in Webmaster Tools. Neither site has had a “link building” campaign ever. By using 3rd party tools (e.g. Majestic) I can see a lot of unnatural links pointing at both sites, but I didn’t put those links there"

There are two quick ways to check your site's link acquisition velocity, using Ahrefs or Majestic SEO.

Extremely  High Link Acquisition Velocity (Ahrefs) 

Unnatural Link Acquisition Velocity (Majestic SEO historic index, cumulative view)

B. How To Check For Site-wide Links

A high number of blog-roll, header, footer or sidebar links can trigger Google’s “overoptimisation” wrath and keeping them to a minimum would be a rather reasonable thing to do. Certainly some site-wide links may have occurred naturally but the less "overoptimisation" signals you site sends out, the better. There are a few ways to quickly check your website against site-wide links with the quickest one being Webmaster Tools.

Under 'Your site on the web' -> Links to your site WMT list the domains that link the most to your site. The ones that link several times should be flagged as potential site-wide links and be manually checked.

Using Webmaster Tools to detect site-wide links is a rather easy and quick way. However, because WMT don't report all backlinks Google actually see, for a more thorough investigation a third party link intelligence service should be used such as Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs etc. One thing to bear in mind using any 3d party service, is that their crawlers do not try to replicate Google's behaviour, therefore in some cases the data can be significantly skewed. This is particularly the case for links from web sites that Google has removed from its index but the 3d party services will still report as normal links. 

A section in the Ahrefs FAQ page reads: “Having the full information at hand you may decide on subjective estimates of links and figure out real situation with the given website or page”. In a similar manner a Majestic SEO rep commented that:

 "Our index is independent of Google and will remain so. If Google has banned a site, it does not mean there are no longer links to that site. We map the link graph – not Google’s interpretation of it."

C. How To Check For Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

Overoptimised anchor text seems like a ticking bomb, especially after Google made public the following two messages:

"Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust."

"Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website."

This task is quite more complicated because, ideally, you need as much data as possible. Exporting anchor text data from as many different data sources as possible is strongly recommended e.g. Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Sistrix, Blekko. 

Next you would need to filter the data removing the following:

• Dead links – These are sites that no longer link to your site but used to link in the past. Filtering out the dead links is absolutely necessary and some 3d party services offer such tools. Otherwise, proprietary link checkers can be used like the one we use at iCrossing UK - Alex Ovsianikov's creation. Counting dead links into a backlinks audit can result in wrong conclusions.
• Deindexed linking root domains – It's rather pointless carrying out a backlinks audit for Google including links from sites that Google has deindexed. NetPeak Checker, makes this task quite easy as it is explained on this post.
• No follow links – These are unlikely to cause any overoptimisation issues and could be discounted
• Site-wide links – These should be counted once, otherwise the anchor text distribution will be greatly skewed. Different services treat site-wides differently; hence you need to pay extra attention at how each service treats them.

After having applied the above filters, the remaining backlinks data could be analysed for different anchor text types such as:

• Exact match targeted keywords e.g. hr software
• Broad match keywords e.g. online hr software system
• Brand terms e.g. BreatheHR, www.breatheHR.com
• Keyword + brand terms e.g. Breathe HR software system
• Image links
• Other e.g. 'click here', 'this site' and other natural anchor text that doesn't fall under any of the above categories.

Having classified all different anchor text variations, it is now relatively easy to spot weaknesses – pay particular attention for spikes on exact match keywords as in the following graph:

D. How To Check For Unnatural Link Authority Spread

Don’t Let The Penguin Leave You In the Cold

About the author
Modesto Siotos (@macmodi) works as a Senior Natural Search Analyst for iCrossing UK, where he focuses on technical SEO issues, link tactics and content strategy. Modesto is happy to share his experiences with others and posts regularly on digital marketing blog Connect.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Related posts:

1. A brief discussion on reciprocal links
2. All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines’ Valuation of Links
3. Whiteboard Friday – Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory Links
4. 6 Ways to Extract All Links from the Current Page

Today we have special guest Marshall Simmonds joining us in the Moz studio to present this week's Whiteboard Friday. Marshall is the Founder and CEO of Define Media Group. He is also a pioneer in the field of SEO, and we are all too pleased to have him present a topic he knows all to well. Having worked for some of the largest online brands, Marshall knows a thing or two about convincing upper management in the value of search.

We look forward to reading your comments below. Happy Friday everyone! Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Hello, SEOMoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Marshall Simmonds. I’m the founder of Define Media Group. I was formally the Chief Search Strategist of the New York Times and About.com.

What I want to talk about today is enterprise search engine optimization, what I’ve learned from enterprise SEO, and how that corresponds to either startup, small to midsize companies, and how to basically convince upper management that what you do is important and how to justify your existence, which is also what I’m subtitling this little presentation about today too.

There are a lot of different schools of thought. Do you need top-down input? Do you need bottom-up input? How are you going about earning your keep? How are you going about justifying and convincing upper management that what you do is a valuable component of search?

A lot of times because of the size of the organization or because of just the overall acceptance of what search is and how companies get accustomed to your traffic and to the expectations of the traffic that will technically, they think, always be there. So a lot of times, search unfortunately kind of blends into the background, and what we do blends into the background. Sometimes we don’t necessarily have the buy-in that we’re looking for.

How do you justify that buy-in? Is it a top-down or bottom-up approach? Unfortunately, there isn’t really a good answer to that. Ultimately, it does help to have upper management buy-in, but ultimately what we’re doing is we’re working in the trenches. A lot of what we’re doing is having to convince product managers, having to convince certain executives or department heads that what you’re doing or what you want to do will help the company from a search perspective.

So we have to find certain motivators to find that pain point or that pressure point. What makes a company act? Is it ego? Is it money? Is it traffic? Is it data? What are those factors that get the attention of upper management or a department head?

For example, ego is a great way to get attention of an editorial team, because editorial teams are driven by having a lot of exposure, making sure that their articles are prominent, making sure that their name is prominent, making sure that their social profile is prominent. The best way to get somebody’s attention is to show examples of failure. Failure is a fantastic motivator when it comes to showing that a competitor may be outpacing you in content creation for a topic or for a piece of content that you should maybe have more exposure for than a competitor does.

Money. Money is, of course, an excellent motivator too, because the value of link equity cannot be underestimated. Link equity is the value of your backlink profile. It’s imperative that a company understands that backlink profile, that it understands that backlinks are essentially the foundation of a company from a search engine optimization perspective. Every company needs to understand this.

It takes a long time to convince a company, to convince upper management that link equity is as valuable as it is. The best way to do that is just to go to the Open Site Explorer. Take a picture, a snapshot, of that backlink profile and put a dollar amount to it to show that if we move content, which is okay, if we redesign or migrate the site, which is okay to do too, it has to be done protecting the empire, protecting the kingdom. That is through link equity, understanding that the monetary value of links cannot be underestimated.

We also have to look at traffic. Traffic is a key differentiator too, because it’s not ranking anymore in search. Ranking is important, but traffic obviously drives the end result. Social has come on so strong in this round too that it’s actually stolen budget. A lot of times in these enterprise organizations, that department is growing at an incredible rate, much faster than maybe the SEO department is.

This is where the SEO and the aikido of SEO is really important, because social is so intertwined. I’m sure everybody knows and understands how important it is in the ecosystem of search. Social drives search, drives traffic, drives social. It’s this symbiotic relationship that we have to work with social.

It’s making sure that we are customizing and yet creating a consistent message with social, with PR, with product, with editorial to ensure that best practices are enacted, and that we’re using the data that comes from social, because it’s really valuable data. The data that we can glean from that user experience and from how our social networks work is incredibly important because it feeds into this data. This data is the last building block as far as the four motivators that I’ve laid out here.

Who gets the reports? We’ve got an incredible amount of data. Now, as an SEO expert, I can’t take that data and put it in front of an editorial team or even upper management. I can of course attach that spreadsheet that I have, but it’s pretty deep down the rabbit hole, and that’s not worthwhile data. On a weekly or a monthly basis, what’s important though is that the editorial team gets a consistent message, a customized message that shows the fruits of their labor, because we want to close that circle. We want to draw the editorial team in and close the loop. What I mean by that is, after they push the publish button, what happens? A lot of editorial teams check out at that moment. But what we need to do is give them data that quantifies and rewards them for their efforts. Sometimes it’s going to be the big green arrow going up, and sometimes it’s going to be a red arrow, but that’s very, very important, simple data that we need to give editorial teams.

Upper management though, however, gets the nuts and bolts. Right? They get to see that over a year-over-year basis, what happened to the traffic. Are there certain outliers? Are there prominent sections of the site that have done well, and why, and giving some explanation about that.

So, who gets the reports and the data? It needs to be highly segmented. Because of who we are, as far as an SEO is concerned, a lot of times there’s not a big barrier. There are not a lot of levels between the head of SEO and the head of marketing, or a CEO, or a CTO. So you may be called to the floor at any point in time to justify why you are doing what you’re doing or why something has gone wrong, which it does.

You always have to know. You always have to know these four things. You have to know how much what you are doing will cost if you’re asking for more budget or if you’re asking for an initiative that you’re trying to push through. You have to know how much it’s going to make, what the traffic potential is, and what’s involved.

If you can’t answer those four questions at any point in time, you’re probably not going to get the traction that you’re looking for. Upper management has to be able to have some quantifiable number or percentage around these four questions. So you have to have this available at any point in time, because if you don’t, you’re going to be held accountable for what we’ve seen in the last year or so. That is something going wrong.

Something is going to go wrong in your SEO plan, in your SEO agenda and grand scheme. It’s imperative that you have that contingency plan. How do you react to what Panda has thrown at us in the last 14 months? A lot of things have happened, but it’s been a huge opportunity for search engine optimization and for the search engine optimization experts.

Panda has been an incredible opportunity to push an agenda, because there are always things that we have been barking about for years and years and years that maybe now are basically getting the exposure and the attention that it needs. That’s what Panda has been good for. Panda has put a light on a section of our network, of our world that may have needed some attention really bad.

The final point is never give up. It may feel like at times you have absolutely no traction, you have no exposure at a company, and the company has no insight into what you are pushing or respect for what you are doing internally. You see mistakes made. You see mistakes repeated. You’re giving the same training over and over and there’s not a lot of attention or there’s not a lot of action as a result of what you’re trying to educate on.

That’s okay. That’s going to happen. You have to find quick wins. You have to find the one person, one department that will buy into just a small part of what you’re trying to push. Is it just changing a title tag? Is it actually uploading or working with ALT text and images. Is it getting a sitemap, just a basic sitemap. Some of these small little wins can create huge results.

That’s the point. It’s to just not give up on your agenda and understand where your floor is and making sure that you don’t go beyond that, but at the same time, looking for whatever win will help drive these motivators, and then essentially justify your existence.

I hope this was helpful. I thank you, and I look forward to the comments.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Related posts:

1. Project Management Tips for Marketing Teams – Whiteboard Friday
2. Which Link Metrics Should I Use? Part 2 of 2 – Whiteboard Friday
3. Outreach for Linkbuilding – Whiteboard Friday
4. The New On-Page Optimization – Whiteboard Friday

Google’s war on lovable critters escalated on April 24th with the release of the “Penguin” update (originally dubbed the “webspam update” by Google). While every major algorithm update causes some protest, post-Penguin panic seems to be at near record levels, worsened by weeks of speculation about an “over-optimization” penalty. Webmasters and SEOs are understandably worried, and many have legitimately lost traffic and revenue. Before you go out and burn your website to the ground for fear of a penguin in the pantry, I want to offer some advice on how to handle life after an algorithm update.

1. What We Know

First, let’s review what we know. I’m going to break the rules of blogging and recommend that you stop and read this level-headed Penguin post by Danny Sullivan. It covers some of the basics and is the most speculation-free post I’ve read on the subject so far. Glenn Gabe also had a good post on potential Penguin factors.  There’s still a lot of speculation, but likely culprits include:

• Aggressive exact-match anchor text
• Overuse of exact-match domains
• Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
• Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links

Many people have suggested low-quality link profiles in general, but analysis of Panda has been complicated by Google’s recent attack on link networks, which seems to have been manual and has probably been going on for weeks. The overlap has made analysis difficult, so let’s take a quick look at the timeline.

What’s the Timeline?

The official roll-out date for Penguin was April 24th, and it seems to have rolled out, for the most part, in a single day. Unfortunately, it came on the heels of other events. On April 19th, Panda 3.5 rolled out (most likely a data update). On April 16th, a data glitch caused a number of sites to be mistakenly tagged as parked domains. Throughout April (and weeks before Penguin), Google started sending out a large number of unnatural link notices via Google Webmaster Tools. Sadly, it seems that April really was the cruelest month.

How Bad Was It?

Google officially claimed that Penguin impacted about 3.1% of English queries, compared to Panda 1.0’s 12%. Since rankings change daily – even hourly – even with no updates, these numbers are nearly impossible to confirm, but it does appear that the impact of Penguin was immediate and substantial. This is an internal SEOmoz graph of Top 10 ranking changes around April 24th (please note that the Y-axis is scaled to accentuate changes):

Pardon the slightly cryptic nature of this graph – it’s for an upcoming project – but the core point is that the impact of Penguin dwarfed either Panda 3.5 or Google’s 4/16 glitch.

Is It Going Away?

In a word: no. Penguin wasn’t accidental, and Google is clearly serious about combatting spam tactics that have been lingering for too long. As you can see from the graph, it doesn’t appear that there were any major reversals in the few days since Penguin rolled out. Does that mean Google won’t make ANY adjustments? Of course not – it’s entirely likely that they’ll continue to tweak Penguin.

For comparison’s sake, remember that Panda 3.5 came 14 months after the initial launch of Panda 1.0. We’ve come a long way since the monthly “Google Dances” of 2003. Keep in mind, though, that Panda was somewhat unique – we believe that it feeds multiple variables into a single ranking factor that gets updated outside of the real-time index. There’s currently no compelling evidence to suggest that Penguin works in the same way. The Penguin update appears to be integrated directly into the main algorithm, like a more traditional Google update.

2. What to Do

Given the overlapping timelines, this advice applies to any Google update, and not just Penguin. The algorithm is changing constantly (Google reported 516 changes in 2010, and that rate seems to be accelerating), and I want to give you the tools to survive not just Penguin, but Zebra, Skunk, Orca, and any other black-and-white animals Google can ruin…

DO Take a Deep Breath

I’m not trying to be condescending or to minimize any losses you may have suffered. Over 17 years of working with clients, I’ve learned that panic almost never makes things better. No matter how hard Penguin hit you, you need to stop, take a breath, and assess the damage. Dig into your analytics and find out exactly where you sustained losses. Segment your data (by channel, engine, keyword, and page) as much as possible. It’s not enough to know that you lost traffic – you need to be an expert on exactly which traffic you lost.

DO Check the Timeline

Even though the overlapping timelines make analyzing the core Penguin factors difficult, the actual timeline when Penguin rolled out is clear. If you saw major traffic losses between Tuesday, April 24th and Wednesday, April 25th, odds are good that Penguin is at least part of the problem.

DO Double-check IT Issues

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been involved in a Q&A or consulting situation where a website owner was 100% sure they had been hit by an algorithm update, only to have their 17th message to me go something like this:

Oh, by the way, our site was down for 3 days a couple of weeks ago, right before our rankings dropped. I’m sure this wasn’t the problem, but I just thought I’d let you know.

Um, erp, what?! I’ve died a little inside so many times from messages like this that I’m not sure that I’m technically still human. Especially if your losses weren’t sudden or don’t match the algorithm timeline precisely, make absolutely sure that nothing happened to your site or changed that could impact Google’s crawlers. One of the worst things you can do in SEO is to spend a small fortune solving the wrong problem.

DO Quickly Audit Your SEO

Likewise, make sure that you know exactly what SEO efforts are underway, not just within your own team but across any 3rd-party contractors. I’ve had clients swear up and down that everything they did was completely white-hat only to find out weeks later that they hired an outside link-building firm and let them loose with no accountability. Make absolutely sure you know what every agent under your control did in the weeks leading up to the algorithm update.

3. What Not to Do

Panic leads to drastic action, and while I don’t think you should sit on your hands, bad choices made under uninformed hysteria can make a bad situation much, much worse. I’m not speaking hypothetically – I’ve seen businesses destroyed by overreacting to an algorithm change. Here are a few words of advice, once you’ve taken that deep breath (don’t forget to start breathing again)…

DON’T Take a Hatchet to Your Links

It’s unclear how Penguin may have penalized links, or if recent reports of link-related issues are tied to other April changes, but regardless of the cause, the worst thing you can do is to start simply hacking at your back-links. Even low-quality back-links can, in theory, help you, and if you start cutting links that aren’t causing you problems, you could see your rankings drop even farther.

I highly recommend this recent interview with Jim Boykin, because Jim has freely admitted to dabbling in the gray arts and he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to risky link-building. Tackling your problem links is incredibly tough, but start with the worst culprits:

• Known, obvious paid links
• Links in networks Google has recently delisted
• Footer links with exact-match anchor text
• Other site-wide links with exact-match anchors

Whenever possible, deal with low-authority links first. If a link is passing very little authority AND it’s suspicious, it’s a no-brainer. Cutting links is tough (see my tips on removing bad links) – if you don’t have control over a link, you may have to let it go and focus on positive link-building going forward.

DON’T “De-optimize” Without a Plan

One complaint I hear a lot in Q&A is that the “wrong” page is ranking for a term. So, to get the “right” page to rank, the well-meaning SEO starts de-optimizing the page that’s currently ranking. This usually means turning a decent TITLE tag into a mess and cutting out keywords to leave behind Swiss-cheese copy. Sometimes, the “right” page starts ranking again. Other times, they lose both pages and their traffic.

“Over-optimize” is a terrible phrase, and that alone has people in a panic. There’s nothing “optimal” about jamming a keyword 87 times into 500 words of copy and linking it to the same affiliate site. “Over-gaming” would be a better word. You think you figured out the rules of the game, so you pounded on them until there was nothing but a pile of dust on the board.

If you think you’ve played the game too aggressively, step back and look at the big picture. Does your content serve a purpose? Does your anchor text match the intent of the target? Do your pages exist because they need to or only to target one more long-tail variations of a term? Don’t de-optimize your on-page SEO – re-optimize it into something better.

DON’T Submit a Reconsideration Request

While I don’t think reconsideration will doom you, Penguin is an algorithmic change, not a manual penalty, and reconsideration is not an appropriate avenue. If you think you were impacted by the recent crackdown on link networks, IF you have removed those links, and IF you aren’t engaged in other suspicious link-building, you might consider requesting reconsideration. Just make sure your house is in order first.

Google has created a form for sites unfairly hit by Penguin, but it’s unclear at this point whether that form will result in manual action, or if Google is just collecting broad quality data. If you sincerely believe that you’re an accidental victim, then feel free to fill the form out, but don’t base your entire recovery strategy on clicking [Submit].

Fix What You Can Fix

Recently, I had a long debate with a client about whether or not they had been hit by a specific algorithm update. In the end, it was a pointless debate (for both of us), because we had two clear facts: (1) organic traffic had fallen precipitously, and (2) there were clear, solvable problems with the site. From a diagnostic standpoint, it definitely helps to know whether you were hit by Penguin or another update, but after that, you have to fix what's in your power to fix. Don't spend weeks trying to prove to management that this was all Google's fault. Isolate the damage, find the problems you can fix, and get to work fixing them.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

No related posts.

Late Sunday night through Monday, the harddrives responsible for most of our rankings system failed. These failures have resulted in slower rankings collection, but has not resulted in lost data.

Update for 5/6/2012-
The past week is all collected, and we began Sunday's collection only 8 hours late- we will be on track before midnight tonight!
April monthly reports are re-generated, as are this weeks reports for Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday and Thursday.  Friday and Saturday are now being generated now and we are on-track to be back to normal by Sunday night.

We will update this post again tomorrow.

What does this mean for customers?

If you’ve set up a customized report, you might not have received your report as soon as you expected to receive it. If you did receive a report and it included a rankings section, one or more of the subsections might have been blank:

These features were intermittently failing because the data was on the affected drives, but as of right now, these should now be functioning, albeit possibly more slowly than normal:

• Campaign ranking history
• Campaign ranking history CSV exports
• The Keyword Analysis Tool
• Custom Reports that include rankings data

For more technical details, please see this post on the dev blog.

When will it be fixed?

We are currently prioritizing the collection of keywords in the order they would normally be collected, which means all rankings collection will be delayed for customers this week. We expect this catch-up process to complete by the end of the week, returning us to normal at that point. Our current expectation is that rankings will be delayed 2-3 days for all campaigns, until we can catch up this weekend.

We are still working to resolve this issue and will update this post every morning until the issue is resolved. We sincerely apologize if these failures affect your work as we know how much you depend on our tools. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and we’ll try to respond quickly.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Related posts:

1. Webmasters Cry Mayday for Google Rankings Again
2. Exportable PDF Reports Now in the Web App
3. Google’s Unspoken Failures Are Limiting Your Potential
4. An Experiment in Boosting Google Rankings w/ Search Volume

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Do you have what it takes to become a superstar blogger?

While anybody can set up a blog…not everyone can take that blog and turn it into a world-renowned blog that ends up on Time Magazine’s best blog list or Ad Age’s Power 150.

The bad news is that you need some pretty unique qualities to make it to the top. The good news is that just about everybody can learn those qualities.

Let’s take a look at them…

Superstar bloggers are insane

Most superstar bloggers have one thing in common: they take risks. They take risks with their blogs and they take risks with their content.

Your goal as a writer for your blog is to stop someone dead in their tracks nearly to the point that they can’t believe you just wrote what you just wrote…

And they have to keep reading.

This means you have to write headlines like How to Rank on the First Page of Google through Videos and 8 Simple SEO Tricks That Will Help You Rank Above the Fold and Increase Your CTR.

But on a higher level, you keep on pushing the boundaries of what your blog can do. You wonder about the design of your blog…and can you make it work harder?

You wonder about conversion and how you can triple it. You think about crazy ideas…

Sure, not every idea will work.

But that’s what separates a superstar blogger from your average blogger…they never give up. They keep trying and pushing and making everything they touch better.

Superstar bloggers write and write and write

You’ll never get away from this one because you have to write a lot to get better at what you do. What I mean by this is you need to write at least 1,000 words a day…

Seven days a week.

Some of that content won’t be that great. Some of it will be awesome and drive you a ton of traffic. Your quantity can suffer some time as long as your quality doesn’t.

And another lesson about writing so much is that you will cast a wider net when you have more and more blog posts online for the search engines to index.

There are currently about 3 billion searches a day on Google…

This will ultimately lead to more visitors and subscribers.

Superstar bloggers stick to their master plan

Do you have a master plan?

In Daniel Pink’s book Drive, he talks about the single sentence that defines you. He uses as an example where Carol Boothe Luce once said to John F. Kennedy, "A great man is one sentence. Abraham Lincoln's was 'He preserved the Union and freed the slaves.' What's yours?"

What about you? What one sentence defines you? Here are some examples to get you motivated:

• A world traveler who speaks about entrepreneurship to foreign governments.
• North America’s greatest digital media strategist.
• A well-rounded political writer with a blog read by 25,000 people.

Those may sound like pretty grand ideas…but remember…superstar bloggers are insane.

They go big.

But once that master plan is in place, you need to stick to it. You need to create the plan and then start working the plan. You won’t go anywhere if you don’t work the plan

You have to ship.

And don’t worry about perfection. Sure, you’ll want to make adjustments when you get feedback…but make those changes and keep pushing forward.

Becoming a blogging superstar is a journey…not a finished goal. 

Superstar bloggers are creative

If you want to become a superstar blogger, then you need to come up with a way that you generate idea after crazy idea.

That’s going to be hard because you will have to churn out a lot of content.

What do superstar bloggers do to keep those ideas and creativity constantly coming? Here are six tips for breaking writer’s block from Darren Rowse:

• Change your environment – If you are struggling to be creative in your office, jump up and work from the kitchen. Or move outside. Spend a couple days a week working from a café or restaurant that doesn’t mind you being there for a while. Or work with a friend.
• Keep an idea journal – Whether you use a notebook and pencil or a free tool like Evernote, jot down ideas for content when ever inspiration hits you.
• Just write – Sometimes to jolt your creative system you need to simply write without an agenda. This is a great way to empty your mind of thoughts and ideas that have been percolating for quite some time.
• Read other bloggers – Become a master at reading a ton of other blogs. If you can manage hundreds a day, you will never be short of ideas. And remember to copy ideas down as you get them.
• Figure out needs – Use your readers’ needs as the starting point for your blog posts. What problems are they facing? What questions are they asking?
• Combine two unrelated ideas – A great exercise for generating ideas is to take two completely unrelated ideas and then combine them. For example, what kind of ideas can you create when you match blogging with Mt. Everest? Or what about digital marketing and The Simpsons? See how that works?

Superstar bloggers are passionate

If you look at bloggers like Seth Godin, Rand Fishkin or Ramit Sethi you’ll see that they love what they do. You can also see that they are also totally immersed in what they do.

Are you totally immersed in what you do?

It’s okay to start a blog and then learn 30 days down the road that you really don’t love the subject you are trying to write on. Maybe it was just a passing phase.

What you need to do, however, is drop it fast and pick up something that you do love…because readers will be able to tell if you are not enthusiastic about your blog. They’ll sniff you out and you will struggle to grow it. 

The godfather of passion, however, has to be Gary Vaynerchuk. His passion is obvious whatever he touches or speaks…it could be on his Wine Library TV or on stage or on one of the many videos that he shares through his marketing blog.

He’s on fire and you can’t help watch him and get on fire, too. And this is why he is a superstar blogger. 

Superstar bloggers interact with their readers

You can not shy away from those who comment on your site. You need to jump in and thank every single person who comments. You need to engage them with questions and pick their brains for ideas on new topics.

Run surveys on your site using KISSinsights or simply publish a post asking for new content suggestions.

You should also run contests that reward your readers with gifts… letting them know how much you appreciate their support.

When you create content that your readers really love and can relate to then you are on your way to creating a vibrant community who will support you for a very long time…both as readers and buyers.

Besides, you want this community engaged so they share your content on the social web.

Superstar bloggers are insanely focused

You’ll kick butt in the blogging world if you can stay focused and organized. The very best of bloggers have a razor-sharp focus…

They see the big picture and then use their self-discipline to stick to it.

But they also don’t do it alone. They use productivity tools to help them stay focused and efficient. Here are 8 I recommend every blogger use:

1. Zaarly – You can hire just about anybody in your area to do just about anything you need done. Want somebody to research for you? What about put a desk together?
2. Batchbook – As your contact list grows, you’ll want a great system to manage it. Batchbook is a cloud-based contact management tool that can even handle your social media contacts.
3. MailChimp – I’ll mention this in a later section, but you’ll want to create an email newsletter that looks professional and doesn’t cost a fortune. MailChimp can help you.
4. DropBox – With this app you can access any document or file anywhere you want. Store a document on your laptop and it’s on your iPhone, too.
5. Jing – This free tool allows you to capture images from the web, create arrows and boxes on those images and then post to your blog. You can also create videos and narrate on the fly…
6. Rescue Time – This thing will easily save you 4 to 5 hours every week because it tracks what you do and helps you avoid distractions.
7. Evernote – Clip a URL, selection of a page or the entire page into Evernote and then save for later. Great for recording ideas for future blog posts.
8. FreshBooks – Once you start earning a living off of your blogging, you will definitely keep track of your income and expenses. This tool will help you do that without wasting your time. 

Superstar bloggers understand their strengths and weaknesses

Great bloggers know what they are really good at…and they know what they are really bad at. This helps them to see what they need to work on…or delegate to someone else…to help conquer their goals.

This can include things like design, code or proofing.

But you also need to learn how to give away those tasks that you don’t enjoy at all. Those are the tasks that rob you of productivity because you tend to procrastinate. And like I mentioned above, use a tool like Zaarly to delegate.

Superstar bloggers use a variety of media

In today’s world, copy is not enough. Google is learning how to index video and audio and giving you a wider net to cast for possible search terms.

What you have to do is learn when to use each of these tools. For example, you need to ask yourself:

• When should you use text? As long as search is dominated by keywords, then this will make up the chunk of content you produce. But as you will see, you will also be combining medias.
• When should you use video? I’m a fan of creating short…anywhere from 2 minutes to 11 eleven minute…videos for tutorial type content. SEOmoz does this with their Whiteboard Fridays and Khan Academy has become famous though his use of video.  This also works well with video, especially with Google+’s hangout feature. Keep in mind that you should create a transcript to put on YouTube and your website for the skim readers and search engine spiders.
• When should you use audio? Audio works great for tutorials, but I’ve found that the best podcasts are those that feature two people talking make it way more interesting. Check out the Manager Tools podcast to see what I mean.

Superstar bloggers diversify their income

Superstar bloggers don’t rely on their blog to bring in all their income. In other words, you don’t rely on just one income stream.

This means that you need to use your blog as a stepping stone to other ventures. This could be to books you sell and create like Darren Rowse does…

or information products to sell like Timothy Sykes does.

Maybe it’s to promote yourself as a speaker or the platform you use to promote your own conference.

In addition, your blog will also become a magnet for joint ventures with other bloggers…something you must engage in if you want to expand your audience. 

Superstar bloggers are thorough and original

While in the early days of blogging…before there was so much competition…being brief was very important.

Not so anymore.

These days people want more than just a quick answer. They want a detailed, highly-researched post that will answer their questions completely.

The worst thing you can do as a blogger is to provide a pat answer to a real problem.

When it comes to creating content for your blog, the superstar method is to study your analytics to see who is coming to your site, when, from what source, where are they going, why they are there…and how to get them converted into subscribers.

There is a huge audience online. This Edison report shows that more than half of Americans who are +12 or older are using social media…

How do you tap into those people?

You analyze the search terms…you study your Twitter analytics to see what gets shared the most…you look into why some posts get more comments than others…and then you create content that produces those kinds of results.

Superstar bloggers are curious

You’re probably thinking that superstar bloggers reach a certain point and then they stop learning.

That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The bloggers that I’ve met who I consider superstars…people like Ben Huh and John Chow…are constantly reading, studying and looking for ways to implement and test their ideas.

These are people who will try anything once. Your weirdoes…

These are your 0.1%. And that’s going to be you.

The thing about these guys and girls is that they are curious, restless and eager to know more.

They are also some of the most humble people I’ve met, too, which is important. They never come off as arrogant or prideful. They want to learn from you no matter who you are…and they want to help you learn, too.

Superstar bloggers are relentless

From reading to writing and testing to tweaking…superstar bloggers never stop. Sure, they may take a short break just to get their bearings again…but they won’t be away from it too long.

And when it comes to writing great content…each and every day they are creating posts that stick to the subject matter they are experts on.

They don’t stray…and when it seems like they do they are always really good about tying the post back into their cornerstone content.

And when it comes to their schedule…superstars are also very consistent here, too. You need to decide when you are going to post…and then stick to it!

One more thing…if you want to become a superstar blogger you have to understand that success takes a long time.

Trust me…I’ve been at this for over ten years…and one of the things that has kept me at it even when things get really difficult…is that I’m relentless and I stick to the master plan.

Superstar bloggers are humble

You can’t really be a life-long learner if you think you know it all. That’s why you need to remain humble and understand that you have so much to learn…

It will take time and you will master certain aspects of blogging. You may become one of the best headline writers like Matt Drudge is…but you know you can always get better.

That’s humility.

Superstar bloggers are self-starters

If you ever plan on working for yourself, then you better know that you will need to be able to manage yourself.

What do I mean exactly?                 

You’ll need to be able to kick yourself out of bed and get to writing when you would much rather sleep in on the rainy day.

The thing about working for yourself is that you only make as much money as you work. If you’re not writing, then you are losing money.

Being a self-starter is all about having ideas…and then putting them to work. If you can’t do that, then you will not become a superstar blogger.

Superstar bloggers watch for trends

If you really want to catch some traction with your blog…watch what is trending on Twitter and Google and then jump on that traffic.

This is why blog posts that tie into current trends always get a lot of traction. For example, when Steve Jobs pasted away I wrote a post on the 11 Business Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Me. And I didn’t just do it for the traffic, but instead it allowed me to look back at all of the great things he helped me accomplish in life.

That post got a lot of traction.

Here’s another example. This is what is hot on searches as of this writing:

You could write an article titled “How Amanda Bynes Getting Arrested Can Make You Filthy Rich.” You could do that with all of those searches.

Keep in mind that trendy posts must relate to your readers self interest…in other words, you just can’t write a trendy post for the sake of writing a trendy post…

You have to write about something your readers care about.

Superstar bloggers find a common enemy

This a great copywriter tactic that says you will engage readers if you choose an enemy that both of you hate. For example, very successful financial newsletters will play on fears that the government is out to get the money of the rich…and make the government the enemy.

In SEO, Google or Microsoft is often played as the enemy…the big bad guys who wants to spy on everyone, play to their favorites and never give SEOs a break:

Now I don’t suggest that your cornerstone content is all about you attacking this common enemy. That will get old quick.

Superstar bloggers are not afraid to outdo another blogger

For the most part the blogging community is made up of people who get along pretty well. So I’m not talking about doing something rude to someone else…

I’m simply talking about taking their idea and making it better.

Here’s what I mean. If I write a blog post called 10 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore…then you can come along and write one called “10 SEO Trends That Will Drive Massive Traffic to Your Site in 45 Minutes”.

When it comes to gaining attention, that strategy really works.

Don’t be afraid to use it. 

Superstar bloggers twist social media to their advantage

Back in the day when blogging was the only game in town the way to get people talking about and sharing your content was through commenting on other blogs.

This is what Pete Cashmore did with Mashable. He literally commented on hundreds of blogs a day.

With the rise of social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook, commenting is still a successful strategy…but using these social media sites have become a major part of a successful bloggers arsenal.

It all starts with creating great content that people love to share. And it continues with you sharing other people’s content, building a list of influencers you follow and interacting on a daily basis with your followers.

Social media will help spread your brand across the web.

Superstar bloggers build a list

The real magic of the blog comes in with the list that you build from your growing audience. The more you blog the more traffic you will get…

But that traffic is worthless if you don’t do anything with it.

See, the email inbox is still a very private thing…and it’s a place that almost everyone still communicates.

Friendstar came and went. MySpace has come and gone. And maybe Twitter, Facebook and eventually Google+ will go away when something new and better comes along.

But through all of this email still remains.

So if you want a way to communicate with your audience…then start building an email newsletter list.

This gives those who sign up an exclusive relationship with you. And your conversion rates will be much higher when you market to the email list. 

Superstar bloggers target their traffic

One big mistake that a lot of beginning bloggers make is they try for the biggest audience. They may end up getting 1,000 hits a day to their blog…but not get more single subscriber or one single person to buy from them.

How can that be? If the traffic is so high…they should be able to make at least one sale, right?

Sadly it’s wrong.

The problem with this approach is that quantity never outranks quality. If you have only 50 highly-qualified hits to your site you will more than likely have higher conversion rates than if you had 1,000.

So know who your audience is and what they want…and then give it to them.

Superstar bloggers are very personal

You likely have one or two bloggers who you think are the greatest. And I’ll bet that one of the reasons that you like these bloggers so much is how personal they are.

They blog every day about business and the world of content marketing, but it’s always in there…those life experiences that are very close to them…and how these experiences can turn into lessons to help you the reader.

Chris Brogan is a master of this skill. If you look at his “Best Of” page you’ll see that a lot of that content is written from a personal perspective:

It’s like he was writing just to you because he is writing like he is talking. He is very conversational. It is coming out so easy because he is passionate and informed about what he is talking about…but it’s in such a personal context that you can totally relate.

Superstar bloggers stick to their brand

While lots of superstar bloggers started off without really knowing their brand…they knew what they were really good at it…but they didn’t have a really good idea of their essence.

But blogging eventually helped flesh that out.

Johnny B Truant has created a brand of blogger misfit. His name alone tells you a lot…but then his avatar that’s branded on Twitter, Facebook and his blog tells you even more. He’s biting into an apple, which reminds you of Adam and Eve and the first sin.

His brand is very distinct.

But this doesn’t mean that you can’t create another blog and create another brand. Lots of superstar bloggers run two or more blogs…but each blog is branded very uniquely.

Conclusion

In a world where so many blogs are being published you need to know what qualities are necessary to rise above the crowd and stand out like a superstar. Fortunately you can look at current blogging superstars and follow what they did.

What other qualities do blogging superstars have? 

About the author: Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Related posts:

1. 7 Reasons to Rethink Your Blogging Strategy: New Research
2. 7 Blogging Tips From Top Bloggers
3. The Paint By Numbers Guide To Artful Blogging
4. Signs That Blogging is Not Only Alive, But More Critical Than Ever

Over the last few months our engineering team has been working feverishly on a new index. Our crawlers were extremely successful, but, we ran into a few bumps in the road along the way. Those proverbial bumps shifted our expected launch date from the beginning of April… to today. It's not all bad, though.

Before jumping into the juicy details of this index, I wanted to first point out that the other news (ahem) we announced today will play a large role in alleviating these delays in the future. Plans include both growing our team of engineers to solve these complex scaling problems and investing in the necessary computing resources to consistently produce a larger index. Money can't do everything, but it sure doesn't hurt when it comes to index consistency.

• 159,751,604,443 (159 billion) URLs
• 1,114,893,161 (1.1 billion) Subdomains
• 153,439,996 (153 million) Root Domains
• 1,768,519,682,804 (1.7 trillion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.47% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 64.05% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 35.95% are external
• Rel Canonical – 11.13% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 82.90 links on it
  • 71.75 internal links on average
  • 11.15 external links on average

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Related posts:

1. Twitter Search Can Now Index 50 Times More Tweets Per Second
2. Early Ranking Factors Data + an April Linkscape Update
3. Early Launch of SERPs Analysis Tool + June Linkscape Update
4. Linkscape Update, New Stats and an API Dashboard

Today is a good day. Whether you're a Mozzer, a fan of what we've built, a Seattle-startup supporter or even tangentially involved in the field of web marketing, there's reason to celebrate. After 5 years of organic growth (from our initial funding in 2007) and two tough, failed attempts at financing (in 2009 and 2011), I'm excited to announce that SEOmoz has raised $18 million in venture capital from Foundry Group and Ignition Partners. Brad Feld from Foundry and Moz's COO, Sarah Bird will be joining the board as Gillian Muessig steps down to pursue new goals. Oh, and that chip on my shoulder about VCs is probably gonna shrink a bit.

You can find the official meme-based press release here. But, as our core values dictate, this post is going to be lengthy and extremely transparent about our progress to date, the financing process, our new investor, and the road ahead. I've broken these into the sections below:

• The Past 5 years of Metrics & Growth
• Our 2012 Funding Process & Deck
• Brad Feld & Foundry
• Company Ownership and Notes on my Cofounder's Departure
• Plans for the Months and Years Ahead

SEOmoz's Past 5 Years of Metrics & Growth

In February of 2007, we launched a collection of tools and resources for SEOs, hoping it would help bolster our traditional consulting practice. By the end of that year, it was responsible for nearly half our total revenue and Seattle's Ignition Partners and Curious Office, invested $1.1mm to help see the vision of software for professional SEOs grow. Two years later, we dropped consulting entirely to focus 100% of our efforts on PRO membership.

Since then, our subscription product has grown tremendously and achieved exceptional traction. We've iterated massively on the orignal product with launches of the Linkscape web index in 2008, Open Site Explorer and our Pro Web App in 2010, the Mozbar for Firefox and Chrome, SERPs Analysis and more recently, too, with additions like Social Tracking, Branded Segmentation, Google Analytics integration, Universal SERPs tracking, and our new, much larger, Mozscape index. And our customers seem to have appreciated it:

*As of April 2012, we're significantly ahead of budget for 2012, w/ a March revenue run rate of ~$19mm

As you can see, our small Series A has carried us a long way. Out of necessity, we've been re-investing nearly all of the money we've made in the last half-decade back into growing the company. Below, you can see the progress of our subscription model over the last 6 months.
_

*December's lower free trials (due to the holidays) means slower January growth

I've talked a number of times about our subscription metrics here at SEOmoz, but given this fundraising, I know there may be additional interest and scrutiny, so I'll try to describe them with a bit more depth:

• On an average weekday, ~150 marketers take a free trial
• Approximately 56% of those 150 free trials will convert into paid memberships
• Of those, ~40% cancel their membership in the first 3 paying months
• The remaining 60% (~50 out of our 150) keep their PRO subscription 13+ months on average (meaning the monthly cancellation rate is ~2.5%)
• Approximately half of those (~25) retain PRO membership for 18+ months
• Note: historically we've counted upgrades/downgrades, billing changes and some other dumb stuff in "churn" which likely inflates those figures.

For an enterprise SaaS business, these metrics are fairly mediocre (well, the churn metrics anyway, the acquisition numbers would be phenomenal), but thankfully, we're not the typical enterprise model. Because we have very low costs for customer acquisition (we acquire ~85% of our customers using inbound marketing rather than paid channels), and very low COGS (no account management, sales people, or services costs), our model scales very nicely. You can see more detail about this in our funding slide deck, embedded in the next section.

Traffic's been growing at a somewhat shocking pace, too. In the first 122 days of the year, SEOmoz + OpenSiteExplorer had 6.85 million visits:

Our traffic from every source has been increasing dramatically. In comparison, the 122-day period from April 3rd – July 30th, 2011 had 4.46 million visits, a growth rate of 54%. Search engines have been sending more traffic, our email marketing efforts are getting better, social media sources are up dramatically, and referring links + branded/direct is up, too. The only traffic source that's remained relatively stable is RSS, which we suspect is due to more and more people replacing their RSS reader with socially-based referrals and apps.

Looking at Moz in 2012, it would appear that we've got a healthy, growing business, but as you can see from the growth chart above, we'd predicted that our last few years of doubling subscription revenue would slow. This is largely due to capital constraints on the business. We couldn't make the technology, infrastructure, people or marketing investments we knew were needed to accelerate. That's precisely why, at our early February board meeting, we decided that despite our setbacks the previous summer, it was time to hit the road seeking venture investment for a third time.

Our 2012 Funding Process & Deck

Our board of directors meets quarterly to discuss the key issues facing the company and review the progress made in the prior three months. At our February meeting, each of our executive team members – Jamie from Marketing, Adam from Product, Sarah from Operations and Anthony from Engineering – expressed the sentiment that their teams could benefit from additional capital and that the time was right for a raise. Kelly Smith (of Curious Office, an observer on our board) and Michelle Goldberg (who represents Ingition) agreed.

Unfortunately, that meant getting my weary, jaded head back into the funding world, something I'd been dreading since our last financing fell apart just after we signed a term sheet in August 2011. We strongly considered but ultimately rejected hiring bankers to help us run the deal process, and this was in large part due to my personal issues of confidence. It's hard to describe that feeling now, but I truly believed and feared that we'd once again spend months on road, pitching investors, and end in June or July with nothing to show for it again.

Much of February was spent contacting investors, colleagues and entrepreneurs we knew and asking for help with introductions, positioning and the creation and review of a funding slide deck. You can see a modified version of that deck below:

Some of those calls and connections led to early interest from some big names in the later-stage industry (VCs who typically put $15-50mm into companies at Series C, D and above). Unfortunately, these started out with a familiar pattern – a call expressing interest, a request for data, upon receipt of that data, a deeper request for more data, repeat ad nauseum. We were just settling in for the tough reality of a long slog to reach that first offer we could leverage to start a process when I got on the phone with Brad.

Brad Feld and Foundry Group

Nearly every entrepreneur and person connected to the startup field knows of Brad Feld and Foundry Group through the exceptional reputation they've built. Brad's been named the most respected VC in the business, makes hilarious music parody videos, funds dozens of successful companies, co-founded Techstars, is a two-time entrepreneur himself, runs inhumanly long distances and sponsors lots of public bathrooms. He's a very awesome, very weird and very Mozzy guy. I liked Ben Huh's recent post about him best:

I've been fortunate to have him on our board and he's helped us even before we took funding. In start-up lingo, he's my number one value add, even on a board studded with greatly helpful and wickedly smart people.

The funny thing is, I would describe my interactions with Brad as slightly weird. Yup. Weird. Not in the creepy WTF? kind of way, but good, like whoa-I'm-being-transported-to-another-planet kinda way…

…He's unlike any VC I've ever met.

When we got on the phone, I knew that A) Foundry almost always does early-stage deals and B) They almost never put more than $10mm into a deal and C) They hadn't asked us for any preliminary information or a deck. Thus, I was fairly certain that this call was purely advice-driven, though I hoped it would potentially lead to some helpful introductions. But, when I started the call asking for help, Brad stopped me. He said Foundry was interested in potentially leading the round themselves. My heart skipped a few beats, and we got into a conversation.

How do I know Brad? Through three of the more unlikely sources imaginable: first, Brad + Seth had looked at SEOmoz briefly in our 2009 raise attempt, but, like a lot of others, passed at the time; second, through my blog post on failing to raise money (which Brad read and wrote about); and last, through my wife Geraldine, whose blog and tweets are apparently a topic of enjoyment between Brad and his wife Amy. Side note: Next time someone asks what Geraldine's blog monetization strategy is, I'm replying with "it already made $18mm, what more do you want?!"

The Saturday morning after that phone call, Brad wrote a post entitled "Don't Be Gunshy Because You Dealt with BucketHeads the Last Time Around." The Moz team was already enamored with Brad and working hard to keep our excitement in check. That post made it harder, and then this email (sent later that evening) made it 10X harder still:

We sent in excess of 40 emails back and forth over the next 3 days. Included in that volley was an invitation to come to Boulder, Colorado to meet some of the companies he'd invested in, his partners at Foundry, and talk seriously about an investment. I also got to talk to T.A. McCann from Gist, Ben Huh from Cheezburger and Keith Smith from BigDoor, Brad's other investments in Seattle.

Interesting side note: Many investors we've talked to over the years have told us to "talk to their CEOs." I almost always take those introductions and get on the phone, but VCs may not realize either A) how honest CEOs are with each other or B) what their CEOs actually think of them. Due to these, I've often heard recommendations that damn with faint praise or point out a lot of good reasons not to get involved.

Brad's one of only a few exceptions. The reviews were unbelievably positive. So much so that it was hard to believe they were real. Each one brought up example after example of Brad putting the entrepreneur's interests ahead of his/Foundry's own, even when serious amounts of money were on the line. He may never have heard of TAGFEE until our conversations, but Brad lives those values in his personal and professional life with the same obsessesiveness that we do at Moz.

On Friday March 16th at butt'o'clock in the morning, Sarah and I boarded a flight to Denver, rented a car and drove to Boulder. We had lunch with the crew from GNIP, another of Foundry's investments. They are clearly awesome dudes – the kind we'd love to work with (and the restaurant they took us to had the impossibly-hard-to-find cult beer, Pliny the Younger, in stock). The pattern of Brad's investment in very cool people was becoming clear.

After lunch, we spent the afternoon meeting with the Foundry team. There's only 4 of them, because Brad doesn't believe in associates (I'll let him explain in a blog post at some point). Jason, Ryan, Seth and Brad were all surprisingly easy-going and their styles put at ease, too. It was a welcome change of pace from the usual hours spent in VC offices. After the meetings wrapped up, Brad took Sarah and I to dinner down the street at Oak.

Within minutes of sitting down, he said (rough, from my memory): "I talked to the guys before we left the office; everyone wants to do this deal. We're in."

Have you ever been in one of those situations where you want to get up, run around the room screaming and high-fiving everyone then order all the beer on the menu, but you have to stay cool and act like everything's normal? First world problem, indeed.

Luckily, 30 minutes later, I got up to "use the bathroom" and texted my wife. She wrote back in classic Geraldine fashion:

Can I just say again how awesome it is being married to her?

We finished dinner with Brad, grabbed froyo next door, walked around Boulder's promenade and went back to our hotel. The following afternoon, he emailed over deal terms, all of which looked good except the pre-money valuation (initially $70mm – we'd hoped for higher). I emailed back that we loved everything about the deal, but were seeking a slightly higher pre-money. Brad said he'd check with his team and get back to us Monday. Despite my illness, I headed out to a bar for Moz's help team manager's (Aaron Wheeler) birthday. On St. Patrick's day.

The bar was packed to overflowing. I think I ordered a "whatever sounds good to you" from the bartender. The wall was lined with Montana-esque memorabilia and knick-knacks. Nearly a dozen mozzers crowded around a jam-packed booth. I looked down at my phone and saw this email from Brad.

Cue me freaking out, standing up from the booth, screaming and possibly attempting to buy everyone in the bar a round of drinks (thankfully, Geraldine grabbed me before I did so as it would have been a very expensive proposition). That round of jumping around and high-fiving everyone I missed out on in Boulder came back that night. I hope that after reading this post, you can let that same crazy smile spread across your face and lift a glass of your favorite beverage to help us toast.

Looking back on this process with Foundry, the calendar is practically unbelievable. The time from the first phone call to an offer and agreement on deal terms was literally 8 days.

Now back in Seattle, we spoke to Michelle from Ignition and went to their Bellevue offices that Monday to pitch their partnership (using the deck you've seen above). The timeline was accelerated by an upcoming 2.5 week trip I had to Madrid, Munich, London, Boston, and San Francisco, but we made it work. When I left for Madrid on Wednesday, March 21st, we had already started the diligence process for our Series B.

On the middle leg of that long trip, in Munich for SMX, I had the chance to share some exciting news with friends at a downtown pub:

And somehow, Geraldine captured their reactions (and mine) with impeccable timing: 

I think Will Critchlow's face in this photo perfectly sums up how all of us at Moz are feeling about this event.

This, of course, was followed by much drinking of German beer:

The round formally closed on Monday, April 23rd, when funds were wired to our account. Sarah sent around a nice screencap:

Prior to that, $2.17mm was our highest-ever account balance (we've been a bit more profitable than expected the last few months). I have to say that after years of aiming for investment to help us grow the business and, yes, to get some additional, external validation of our work, our model and our market, the transaction itself feels pretty good. But, perhaps stranger still, was a reflection on the funding I shared first with Geraldine, and then later in an email to Brad:

It sounds cheesy or overly-sentimental to say, but it's the truth. The money is going to help us do amazing things, and it's going to mean we can do a lot more of them faster and at greater scale than we could have on our own. But money can come from a lot of places. There's only one seat on our board for a new investor and I'm more certain than I've ever been about anything in my long tenure with this company that he and Foundry are the right match for our special brand of startup.

The Company Today and My Cofounder's New Path

For those interested in the VC world and the specific of the transaction, I'll try to provide some detail:

• The "pre-money" valuation of SEOmoz for this round was $75mm, which is ~4.1X our revenue run rate at the time of the deal.
• Ignition contributed $3mm to the round; Foundry put in $15mm
• The round carries mostly Series A terms, meaning a liquidation preference of 1X, but with no "participation" (this means in the event of a sale/liquidation of the company at less than their investment price, they get their money out first, but in a higher-than-investment price, they get only the percentage of the company they own and not the investment capital + stock returns, known as "participating preferred")
• Sarah Bird, our longtime COO, will be joining the board of directors
• Brad Feld from Foundry will also be joining the board
• Gillian Muessig, my co-founder (and my mom), will be stepping down from the board of directors and resigning her title of President (more on that below)
• Both Gillian and I gave up some shares without compensation in this round in order to issue grants to current employees to protect them from dilution (also more on that below)

Following the transaction, here's how the ownership breakdown of SEOmoz looks (be sure to mentally place a ~ in front of numbers):

As part of this round, Gillian and I had initially planned two somewhat unique moves.

First, to take some "money off the table," meaning that we'd sell shares directly to the company and use some of the funding for personal capital. We had initially intended to have Gillian take ~$4mm and me take $1mm, but ran into a challenge around pricing. In order to fairly value "common" stock (which is what Gillian, myself and employees own), companies must undergo a 409A valuation by an external party. Ours came back valuing the common stock at $49mm (vs. $93mm for preferred). This low number is great for employee option grants and recruiting, but means that we'd be selling a lot of shares to reach those target numbers. Hence, we opted to take more minimal payouts now of ~$440,000 each, most of which is going into a fund for some family members' debt we've long wanted to pay off. In the future, we'll have the option to sell back more shares at future 409A valuation prices.

The second move is more non-standard. When a new employee joins a startup, they usually receive stock options equivalent to some percent of the company's total ownership (if you're interested in learning more, I recommend this post from Dan Shapiro and this one from Tony Wright on the topic). For example, let's say John joined SEOmoz in January 2012 and received 1,000 stock options and we have a total of 1,000,000 shares. John has options equivalent to 0.1% of the company. In a normal fundraising round, everyone takes some "dilution" to make room for the new investors. If the new investors own, say, 20% of the company in the funding round, John's options now represent 0.08%.

Gillian and I have always been passionate about three goals around SEOmoz:

• Make it easier for people to spread ideas on the web (first with consulting, then later through software and education)
• Create a role model company in Seattle that will inspire others in the startup and marketing ecosystems
• Mint a large number of new millionaires in the Seattle region through the value the company creates

Saying those are goals is one thing, but making tangible, visible moves to prove that commitment is harder. This is one of the few times we can show how serious we are about goal #3. Thus, we each sacrificed shares we owned to give back to each active employee at the company so they maintain their ownership percentage. In our example of John above, this would mean 0.02% of new stock options granted to him.

I'm incredibly grateful to Gillian for helping to make not just this transaction and stock sacrifice possible, but for all the amazing support and effort she's devoted to the the company over the last decade. For those who don't know, Gillian founded the business that eventually became SEOmoz in 1981! That's more than three decades ago. For the first two, she was the sole propietor. After 2001, when I dropped out of school, we joined forces with Gillian as President for the next 6 years. In 2007, after our funding transaction from Ignition, she stepped out of a day-to-day operational role to contribute as a full-time evangelist and member of our board of directors. Today, she takes another step toward pursuing new goals and aspirations.

Thousands of folks in the Moz community have met and interacted with Gillian over the last few years through her extensive world travels. I hope you'll join me in thanking her for the amazing work she's done and supporting her new, more independent direction.

Plans for the Months and Years Ahead

The few people I've told of this transaction before today almost always ask "what are you going to do with $20 million in the bank?!"

We do have some big plans, but we also want to be very cautious and deliberate with spending. Given our revenue and expenses run rate, this is a decent amount of operating capital, but it certainly doesn't give us the freedom to be reckless. Several items on our roadmap in the next 12-18 months include:

• Hire 12-15 new mozzers in roles across the company. We'll be posting those here and would love to have your help recruiting.
• Move offices, hopefully by January/February of 2013, to help accomodate a larger team.
• Grow Mozscape, our link graph, dramatically in both size and freshness. In April, we spent nearly $500K to keep things running. We have a lot of infrastructure and code investments to make to get better here. Short term, we're looking to have new indices close to 100 billion URLs every 2 weeks, then improve from there. Later today (possibly tomorrow) we'll be launching a new index (~150B URLs, almost 3X our previous record).
• Launch one very big, exciting new project we've been building since last year, hopefully in October or November of 2012, but possibly early 2013.
• Look into some potential acquisitions of companies/assets for technology, data, people and strategic considerations.
• Ramp up marketing, both on the inbound front and in paid channels.
• Invest in some research and content-focused projects across the field of inbound marketing – content, community, search, social, analytics and CRO. I'm looking forward to doing more work like our beginners' guide and ranking factors projects in each of these arenas.

If you have suggestions, we are, of course, all ears!

My sincere thanks and great big hugs go out to everyone in the Moz community, Seattle startup world and of course, our investors, new and old. We know that the road ahead will have more big challenges to overcome, but it's been so much more fun and rewarding taking this ride together. Here's to finally putting the psychological fear and disappointment of failed funding behind us and to an incredibly bright future.

p.s. If you have any questions related to this news, feel free to ask in the comments and I'll do my best to reply (am on my way to the Future of Web Insights conference in Vegas this afternoon, so please forgive if I'm a bit tardy).

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Related posts:

1. Zenverge Closes $20.5 Million Series D Financing Led by Entropic Communications
2. European Commission Clears Joint Venture To Fight Google
3. Which Link Metrics Should I Use? Part 2 of 2 – Whiteboard Friday
4. Introducing Branded Keyword Rules and Metrics!

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Google’s new smartphone crawler may have made mobile SEO easier or slightly more predictable, but that is not the end of the story. This is the second in a 3 part series aimed at giving more actionable mobile SEO tips for how to understand and respond to Google’s new smartphone bot. In the last post, we covered how the new smartphone bot works, and which sites will be affected by the change. This post will focus on how to generate mobile redirects that will help the smartphone bot find and index your mobile content correctly. The next and final blog post in this mobile SEO series will review common indexing problems with mobile sites, and how to prevent them.

Since the smartphone bot caches and follows mobile redirects when they are in place, the ranking of your mobile-specific pages (like ones on an ‘m.’) becomes much less important than the rankings of your desktop pages on smartphones. You can usually rely on the strong SEO and rankings of your desktop pages to make desktop pages out-rank mobile pages, even on a mobile phone, but now when a smartphone requests one of those desktop pages from a search result Google will automatically serve the mobile page instead of the desktop page. Problems enter the picture quickly when the redirection is not set up properly.

Google is not being very transparent about this new bot. As of the writing of this article there are many questions on the blog post with the official announcement of the new bot, but they have all gone unanswered by Google. (Here is the official announcement from Google with unanswered comments below).

What we do know, is that the smartphone bot emulates [pretends to be] a smartphone (specifically an iPhone 4.1) when it crawls your website, and thus, it follows any redirects that are in place that would be targeted at a smartphone – This redirection of visitors on smartphones to a different page is called user-agent detection and redirection. Essentially, when a page is requested from your server, the server looks to see what type of device is requesting the page. If it is a smartphone, the server sends the visitor to a different version of the page. (This is all controlled by PHP or ASP.NET code that is placed on the server, and in header of all the page templates.)

Based of what we know of Google, and how they handle mobile and desktop indexing, here are some notes and speculations about how to create the proper types of mobile redirects that will most likely get indexed:

Server Based Redirects – 301 & 302

In the SEO world of redirects, the 301 is King, but in mobile the 302 is a bit more common. This is because many mobile platforms generate temporary mobile pages that don’t actually exist permanently on servers anywhere, so the developers don’t want to open themselves to any risk that might be associated with a ‘permanent’ redirection. My guess is that the smartphone crawler can cache EITHER a 301 or 302 redirect but the redirect must be set to be ‘privately cachable’ in the html headers and it must go to a permanent, indexable mobile page. The likelihood of Google caching on-page JavaScript redirects is low, as is the probability of Google caching multiple versions of parameter-based redirects to dynamically generated pages, because this would all be too hard to police and waste lots of unnecessary space in their datacenters.

Redirection on Every Page

Like with desktop websites, you cannot always assume that mobile visitors will enter your site from the mobile home page. For the mobile redirects to be indexed properly by the smartphone crawler you will need to set up user-agent detection and redirection on every page on your site, and not just the home page. If the redirection script is missing from internal pages, the smartphone bot will not see the mobile pages, so when the listing is clicked on from a smartphone search result, the visitor will still be delivered to the desktop version of that page since there is not redirect cached.

Always Page to Page

Google really likes having a discrete ratio of associated pages in its index. What that means for your redirects, is that they should be from a specific page on the desktop site to the corresponding specific page on the mobile site. This assumes that the mobile version of your site is a complete mirror of your desktop site, and creates problems for mobile sites that don’t entirely mirror their desktop counterparts. If your mobile site and your desktop site are significantly different, you have to do the best that you can to associate mobile desktop pages with the mobile page that is most closely related, even if it is not an exact match.

Example: A news site that does not bother adding all of its articles to the mobile site is a common situation where there is not a 1-to-1 ratio of mobile pages to desktop pages. When that is the case, your only option that is good for both users and search engines is to either have no redirect and serve the mobile visitor the desktop page, OR redirect the desktop visitor to the category page for the type of news they were looking for, with a small message inserted at the top of the page with JavaScript, to explain that the page they requested has not been mobilized – and that they can click a link to see the desktop version of the story or view other topics in that news category.

If you decide simply not to include a redirect, and serve the desktop page, a simple alternative would be to add a separate mobile stylesheet to the desktop page template. With that in place, at least the desktop content will be formatted to fit on the visitors’ screen, even if it is not 100% updated to the full mobile page template.

One common way to handle mobile redirection is to detect and redirect from all desktop pages to the mobile home page. This is particularly bad for SEO, and likely bad for the smartphone bot in particular. The smartphone bot is probably comparing the content on the desktop page and the page it is redirecting to, and it might not redirect people if they do not meet a threshold of similarity. Even if that is not the case, this setup would be bad for users in a search scenario, who think they are clicking on a specific search result, but then arrive at a home page, and have to go about re-finding what they were looking for all over again.

Mirrored Mobile & Desktop Urls

Mirrored urls can give Google a stronger sense that the two versions of the page are closely associated, especially when serving one in place of the other, as Google’s new smartphone bot does. To create mirrored or parallel url structure between the desktop and the mobile site, you must simply replicate the file structure of the desktop site on the mobile site with the only modification being the addition of either the mobile subdomain (‘m.’) or the mobile subdirectory (…/m’) on the mobile alternatives.

Example: www.yoursite.com/cindy has a mobile version of m.yoursite.com/cindy or www.yoursite.com/m/cindy, so the file structure IS mirrored or parallel.

www.yoursite.com/cindy with a mobile version of m.yoursite.com/article_id12345#cindy is not mirrored, nor is www.yoursite.com/m/article_id12345#cindy

Again, this rule assumes that there is a one-to-one ratio of desktop pages to mobile pages, and that may not be the case on your site, but you should do the best you can to be consistent with the url structures and differences between your mobile and desktop pages. If your pages are already set up that way, there is a handy mobile redirection script generator to help you generate the page to page redirect rules, and it can do as many as 4 versions of a site, so desktop, smartphone, WAP and tablet in ASP.NET or PHP. 

iPhone-Specific Handling

Since the smartphone bot is emulating an iPhone, your server will likely send it exactly what it would send to an iPhone. That means that if you are handling iPhones with specific content or a different version of the site, you should be extra careful to make it crawlable, and to make sure that it is ok to serve that content to all of the smartphones. If you have different pages for non-iPhone traffic, then you may need to set up user-agent detection and redirection on your iPhone pages, to send the other types of smartphones to the other pages, to over-ride the automatic redirection from the smartphone bot.

If you are using iPhone specific advertising that is triggered by on-page JavaScript that detects the handset and shows the add (very common for on-site app advertising and promotion) then that is fine, as long as it is crawlable, and not always redirecting to one specific page. If that is the case, then you might have to consider blocking the smartphone bot, until those settings can be updated; otherwise, you may have to block the smartphone bot totally. With the lack of transparency from Google it is hard to be sure about the specific architecture and settings that will have the most positive impact on your mobile rankings and user experience. This is a basic set of rules that are considered mobile Best Practices. They are most likely recognized and understood by the new bot, and should serve you and your users well, at least until we are given more clarity and have more time to compile and evaluate the long term impact of Google’s new smartphone crawler.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Related posts:

1. Samsung Smartphone lead in Blogging & Social Networking application with Mobile Web Technology
2. Interactive Mobile Video Ads – Tapjoy Offers Ad Choice & Real-Time Bidding
3. Crawler Face-off: Xenu vs. Screaming Frog
4. More Smartphone Owners Using Local Search And Social Networking

Because we want to gather the best data from a wider sample set, we've extended the Industry Survey deadline until Friday, May 18th. Help your fellow online marketers and take the 2012 Industry Survey today.

We'd also like to thank our partners who believe in the importance of this survey, including Outspoken Media, Search Engine Land, Distilled, Hubspot, Search Engine Journal, Techipedia, AimClear, Blueglass, Marketing Pilgrim and Search Engine Watch.

 

 

All survey answers are anonymous, so your privacy will be protected. If you do enter the drawing, we will not share or abuse your email address. 

 

If you want to share out the survey via Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc., we'd be greatly appreciative.

 

 

Thank you so much. You're awesome!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Related posts:

1. 2010 Industry Survey Results, Infographic & Surprising Trends
2. Pay-TV Industry Loses Subscribers in Q2 ’10 For First Time Ever; Cable Bears Brunt
3. Is Video Email Marketing There Yet? Share Your Opinions
4. Netflix Tops Customer Loyalty Survey, Beats Apple for Number One Spot

What’s New This Week?

Google Analytics Adds a New Set of Social Reports: These new social reports “help you measure the impact of your social marketing initiatives and evaluate the effect social media has on your goals and ecommerce activities.”

"The four new reports aggregate key data points to help you see the complete picture of how social marketing and media affect your business."

Pinterest Announces Attribution and Easy Sharing With Flickr: Pinterest has “worked with Flickr and other communities to make it easier to pin and credit content creators. Images with sharing enabled on Flickr now have a Pin It button, and pins from Flickr now have a clear attribution statement on Pinterest.”

"Attribution appears below the pin’s description and provides a permanent link to the work, its author and where they host their content."

Twitter’s Discover Tab Delivers More Personalized Content: Twitter is rolling out an upgrade of its Discover tab. Twitter has “incorporated additional personalization signals to select Discover stories, including tweets that are popular among the people you follow and the folks they follow.”

Twitter is rolling out "this redesigned and more personalized Discover experience on Twitter.com, iPhone and Android."

Discussion from our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:

• What questions do you ask a web designer?
• What is your biggest challenge when it comes to blogging?
• Are you having issues with HootSuite posting to Facebook pages?

LinkedIn Purchases SlideShare for $119 Million: The top business-to-business social network added the top sharing site for PowerPoint presentations to ranks.

Foursquare Gives Businesses a Faster Way to Get Started: Businesses now have the option to instantly verify their business on Foursquare for a one-time $10 fee.  ”You can still verify by mail at no cost (although it takes three to four weeks). Once you’re verified, you can start using Foursquare’s free tools right away, like offering specials, updating your listing and getting stats about your visitors.”

This new paid option allows businesses to get started faster on Foursquare.

Tumblr Sponsor Products Are Now Available: These are the first types of ads offered on Tumblr.

There are two different types of Tumblr ads available: Tumblr Radar and Tumblr Spotlight.

GoogleTV Updates Their YouTube App: There are new Recommendations and Search features, and a Google +1 button inside the new app.

Recent updates make integration easier.

Here’s a useful social media tool worth noting:

BackupPress: An easy, low-priced WordPress plugin to back up your site.

BackupPress starts at $5 per month.

And don’t miss this:

Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Success Summit 2012  (online conference) just started. It’s not too late to join!

Join 27 social media experts at Social Media Examiner’s big online conference! Go here to learn more.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.

Related posts:

1. Google Gets Social: This Week in Social Media News
2. New Social Analytics: This Week In Social Media
3. More Social Networking Options: This Week in Social Media
4. Google+ Updates: This Week in Social Media